Police uncover Youtube link to London terror attack ♦officers secretly recorded Barking cell devising van and knife atrocity
♦may says ‘enough is enough’ after London Bridge horror leaves 7 dead ♦terrorist shot dead by police tried to radicalise children in local park
COUNTER-TERRORISM officers secretly recorded an alleged Isil-inspired terror cell in Barking last month discussing how to use Youtube to plot a van and knife attack in London, The Daily Telegraph can reveal.
The investigators were monitoring the alleged extremist cell in the east London borough weeks before Saturday night’s attack in the capital, which left seven dead and 48 injured. Last night the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack.
Yesterday police arrested 12 people, among them seven women – all of them in Barking and other parts of east London, where at least one of Saturday’s killers was believed to have lived. Those arrested were aged from 19 to 60.
Three terrorists shouting “This is for Allah” as they stabbed at their victims were killed by police just eight minutes after the alarm was raised shortly after 10pm on Saturday. Officers revealed yesterday that they fired an “unprecedented” 50 bullets at the attackers, who wore fake suicide belts to maximise panic and fear.
Now The Daily Telegraph has learnt that police had been monitoring an extremist cell in that area since March.
Yesterday Theresa May declared “enough is enough” as she set out her plan to tackle terrorism. “We cannot and must not pretend that things can continue as they are,” she said.
Addressing the nation from outside Downing Street after the second terrorist attack during the election campaign, the Prime Minister said that internet companies had allowed terror to thrive by creating a “safe space” for extremism and called for international agreements to “regulate cyberspace”.
Mrs May said Britain had been too tolerant of Islamist extremism, allowing copycat killers to repeat atrocities in the wake of the Westminster and Manchester attacks.
An unnamed friend of one of the terrorists claimed yesterday he had reported the man to the police anti-terrorist hotline after he became radicalised by watching extremist videos on Youtube. He said the attacker had listened to hate speeches by the infamous American Islamist Ahmad Musa Jibril.
A neighbour of one of the suspected attackers claimed she had reported him to Barking police two years ago, after he began “brainwashing” her children at a local park.
She said she had confronted him afdiscovered ter her two children came home and said: “Mummy I want to become a Muslim.”
In other developments yesterday:
♦ Stories of heroism during the terrorist attacks emerged, including a policeman who was stabbed in the face and head as he tackled the killers armed only with his baton;
♦ Donald Trump said it was time to “stop being politically correct” about terrorism;
♦ The first victim of the attack was named as Canadian Chrissy Archibald, who had moved to Europe to be with her fiancé
♦ Police disclosed they had accidentally shot and injured a member of the public as they fired on the terrorists;
♦ It emerged Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) had urged followers to ramp up attacks during the holy month of Ramadan, which finishes on June 24;
♦ A tribute concert in Manchester for the victims of last month’s suicide bombing went ahead as planned.
Police confirmed yesterday that three men drove at speed across London Bridge in a hired van, knocking down pedestrians, before leaving the vehicle at nearby Borough Market and marauding through bars and restaurants stabbing and slashing indiscriminately at victims.
One of the terrorists reportedly shouted “this is for my family, this is for Islam” as he plunged a knife into a 23-year-old victim who is now in hospital.
In the recent surveillance operation in Barking last month one suspected jihadist discussed what appears to be an identical plot. The Daily Telegraph has that one alleged suspect said the intended method was to “use a car as a weapon” and boasted that he had radicalised more than a dozen “students” in Barking “wanting to martyr themselves”.
He said the plot would involve driving at pedestrians and then getting out of the vehicle to attack others.
He added: “Youtube videos all make it properly easy to do.”
One of the plotters talked about “getting an automatic [vehicle] so the boys can drive it”.
A neighbour of one of the men shot dead by police on Saturday said he had asked him about where he could hire an automatic van, during a conversa- tion when the neighbour was using a hire van to move furniture.
The men under surveillance are also said to have talked about attacking a bridge – in their case Westminster Bridge – and going to the gym to make their arms more powerful and therefore more lethal when using knives. Neighbours said the London Bridge attack suspect was a keen gym user.
Material connected to the alleged plotters who were being tracked last month included pages from the Islamist magazine Ramiyah, which suggest that easy “prey” include “a drunken kafir [non-believer]”.
In a statement released 24 hours after the killings on its official Amaq media channel, Isil said the three suspects had been part of a “sleeper cell”.
It said: “A security unit of Islamic State fighters carried out the London attacks yesterday.”
It is the third attack in Britain the terror group has claimed in as many months. Isil had called on its supporters in Europe to carry out attacks on “infidels” during Ramadan.
Election campaigning by the Conservatives and Labour was suspended for most of yesterday as a mark of respect but resumed last night and Thursday’s polling will go ahead as planned.
Mrs May said “violence can never be allowed to disrupt the democratic process”.
Security at polling stations is expected to be increased on Thursday, and Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley said there would be “increased physical measures” on London’s bridges to protect
“If mosques which preach hatred of the West need to be closed, then we should do it.”
Allison Pearson
“Tougher measures need to be put in place to prevent known Islamist sympathisers.”
Con Coughlin
“Even our own leaders admit that we have not worked out how to foster better integration.”
Juliet Samuel
My daughter lives in Borough Market, a few feet from the place where people were enjoying a balmy summer evening when three marauding barbarians came to kill them. My teenage son, when he visits his sister, likes to walk across London Bridge and revel in the illuminated skyline, a mile-long diamond necklace. How the heart soars at the sensation of being right there at the centre of our capital city. Only a change of half-term plans meant that neither of my children was caught up in the massacre on Saturday night. We had a frantic couple of hours trying to account for everyone’s whereabouts while fielding calls from anxious grandparents and friends. “Is she safe?”
“Yes, she’s safe.”
“Did he stay at the flat?”
“No, thank God.”
Any relief was overridden by dismay. Again? Please, not again.
Manchester’s victims not yet in their graves and now this. A feeling like lead in the stomach. But we were the lucky ones. Other people’s daughters and sons would never reply to frantic texts and voicemails. A young woman I couldn’t get out of my mind was one of those who had their throats cut.
Pictures on the TV showed our favourite family haunts transformed into a place of execution. The steps from the bridge down to the stolidly reassuring Southwark Cathedral occupied by a phalanx of police with automatic weapons ready to shoot; the restaurant nestling beneath, with its jaunty make-shift canopies and holiday atmosphere, in blood-curdling panic.
The celebrated tapas bar, Brindisa, at the entrance to the market itself; a place of so much pleasure, now in lockdown with petrified people hiding in bins and loos and cellars.
Borough Market makes you glad to be alive. The sheer abundance – stalls tumbling with twenty kinds of apple, hams the size of a car – is an earthly delight. And now that place which teems with life has become a battlefield littered with corpses in a war we hardly know we’re fighting, a war that our leaders don’t want to name because, if they give the enemy a name, they may unleash forces they have no idea how to control.
How predictable and sickening it was, late on Saturday night, to see the first reflex attempt to play down the third heinous terrorist attack on this country in three months. On the BBC, a woefully out-of-her-depth reporter talked blithely about the “incident” as if it were a crash on the M4, not an act of pre-meditated mass murder. At quarter past midnight, I yelled at the screen when the same reporter moved on to “seeing the good side of human nature on… occasions like this”. Before the dead were even cold, we were being enjoined to spout the approved platitudes.
During the election campaign, it’s shocking how party leaders have managed to avoid sharing their plans
‘Manchester’s victims not yet in the grave and now this. A feeling like lead in the stomach’
for tackling the greatest single threat this country faces. Tim Farron’s Liberal Democrats have a shameful history of opposing control orders, which would at least have restricted the movements of 3,000 terrorist suspects whom MI5 must somehow keep tabs on.
Theresa May’s government has allowed up to 400 jihadists to return to the UK after fighting for Isil in Syria. (France allegedly sent out orders for hers to be killed.) Only seven of those 400 traitors were under a Terrorist Prevention and Investigation Measure when the UK threat level was at “severe”.
Furthermore, Mrs May has shocked Tory voters by her failure, so far, to clamp down on sharia courts and other examples of creeping Islamisation. As for Jeremy Corbyn, he probably thinks the right thing to do with a jihadist is invite him down the allotment for a nice chat.
The hopeless complacency of the Establishment was typified yesterday morning on Radio 4 by Sir Peter Fahy, former chief constable of Greater Manchester. Sir Peter pointed out that five or six people will be killed a day in road traffic accidents and urged people to have a “proportionate response” to the events at London Bridge.
Innocent people are butchered on a lovely summer evening by men who hate them just for being who they are. What, pray, constitutes a “proportionate response” to that abomination? When is it OK to be angry that evil seeds have been allowed to germinate in closed communities which now present a lethal threat to our society?
Yesterday, the Prime Minister finally said, “Enough is enough”. There is, she admitted, “far too much toleration of extremism in our country” and it would take “difficult and embarrassing conversations” to fix it, along with giving police and security services “all the powers that they need”. Let’s hope tough talk translates into tough action, Theresa.
If mosques which preach hatred of the West need to be closed, then do it. If the three London Bridge murderers turn out to be “known to the security services”, we are surely justified in asking why weren’t they electronically tagged or kept away from the public by any means at our disposal?
My son, who could so easily have been among the victims on London Bridge, came into my bedroom after the attacks and was incredibly upset. He demanded to know why something wasn’t done to clamp down on these murderous bastards. Try explaining to a furious 17-year-old why the civil liberties of Islamic extremists trump the right of Britons like him to not be hacked to death. I sure as hell couldn’t.
Yesterday morning, we got an email saying that the flat in Borough was still cordoned off and was likely to have had its door kicked in by police. My daughter could not go back there until further notice.
After such horror, there should be no going back. Borough Market will bloom again, of course. The young and the foodies will flock there to savour its pleasures, those earthly delights that the Islamists despise and wish to extinguish. That is as it should be. But the dead and the injured should not have suffered in vain. Their pain and their grievous wounds must not be conveniently forgotten in the name of “community cohesion”, which is nothing of the sort. A young woman having her throat cut will never be a normal part of British life, or that life will no longer be worth having.
How chillingly prophetic the words of George Orwell feel today: “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.”
The evil that ran at people with knives on Saturday night has a name. For the sake of all our children, and generations to come, we should not be scared to say it out loud, and destroy it before it destroys us.